How To Add Subtitles To Your Book Trailer On YouTube

Web savvy authors have found new readers with book trailers. But what happens when your book gets translated and you want readers in France, Japan and Germany to pick up your foreign editions?

Now, thanks to a YouTube update, you can easily add translations to your book trailer that is already on YouTube. It’s a fairly straightforward process and doesn’t require video formatting or tech know how. If you can use YouTube, you can do this–start by making a caption track for your video. YouTube explains the next steps in this blog post:

Select “Request translation” in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.” We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster … To give you context on the captions, we’ve also embedded the YouTube video in the editor so you can watch as you translate. For several languages we’ll provide first draft of the translation using Google’s machine translation technology. We’ll also provide preview of what the translated caption looks like on the video so you can make sure the translated captions fit.